Election 2014

Democrats’ white-vote dilemma
Sitting on the back of his truck, a homemade turkey wrap in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, Mark said the Democratic Party he grew up with is vastly different from the one that exists today.

Show Biz Democrats Fear Loss of Senate Majority
One of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s online attack ads against Democratic opponent Alison Grimes featured her picture lined up next to President Obama, Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand.

Republicans Strike Mark Begich Where He’s Strongest
The case against Sen. Mark Begich isn’t about Obamacare, spending or federal debt. Instead the first round of general election advertising in Alaska hits the first-term Democrat where he’s strongest: women’s issues and work ethic.

Obama Scandals

Judge Orders Release of ‘Fast and Furious’ Docs
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to give Congress a list of documents related to Operation Fast and Furious that the Obama administration is withholding under claims of executive privilege.

Gun Rights

Seventeen years after Dunblane, it’s still impossible to discuss the effectiveness of the handgun ban
I can’t remember a crime that traumatised Britain as much as Dunblane did. Abominations come and go, but this one was different. Perhaps the ordinariness of the setting made it more immediate to most of us than news from Syria or Nigeria. Perhaps it was the age of the victims: their first year at school, when their personalities were beginning to flower, when they were just deciding on their favourite colours, their best friends.

War & Terror

Yazidis Held as Sex Slaves by ISIS Plead for Help
As the White House declared mission accomplished for saving the Yazidis under siege by ISIS fighters on Mount Sinjar, activists and leaders from the sect tell Kurdish news outlet Rudaw that about 2,000 Yazidis remain unaccounted for — in the hands of ISIS.

Did the U.N. Commit War Crimes in Gaza?
Yesterday I urged conservatives to challenge jihadists and their enablers in international tribunals, including the U.N. Our ACLJ international affiliate, the European Centre for Law and Justice, sent a letter to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights detailing Hamas’s war crimes and describing exactly how her accusations against Israel lead to further use of human shields and further abuse of civilian facilities.

Senator Inhofe warns of potential terrorist attacks on U.S. soil
It is a serious warning coming from Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe as he warns of the potential of another attack on American soil. The senator sat down with Fox 25 to talk about a variety of topics, but as ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the top issue was national security.

Wired Magazine calls for Birth Panels
Europe really is determined to party like it’s 1939, aren’t they? In France, shops of Jewish merchants are having the windows smashed. Meanwhile, Wired.com’s UK site is exploring another topic that was much in vogue in post-Weimar Germany right around the same time as kristallnacht. “It’s time to consider restricting human breeding”

Officer Darren Wilson Suffered “Orbital Blowout Fracture to Eye Socket” During Mike Brown Attack
The Gateway Pundit can now confirm from two local St. Louis sources that police Officer Darren Wilson suffered facial fractures during his confrontation with deceased 18 year-old Michael Brown. Officer Wilson clearly feared for his life during the incident that led to the shooting death of Brown. This was after Michael Brown and his accomplice Dorian Johnson robbed a local Ferguson convenience store.

California Assembly Votes to Change Washington Redskins’ Name
California lawmakers voted Monday to urge that the National Football League change its name because it is “believed by some to be a racial slur and to promote discrimination against Native Americans.” The vote was a lopsided 51-4 in the State Assembly, with only four Republicans voting against the bill, including former gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly.

The Meltdown
In July, after Germany trounced Brazil 7–1 in the semifinal match of the World Cup—including a first-half stretch in which the Brazilian soccer squad gave up an astonishing five goals in 19 minutes—a sports commentator wrote: “This was not a team losing. It was a dream dying.” These words could equally describe what has become of Barack Obama’s foreign policy since his second inauguration. The president, according to the infatuated view of his political aides and media flatterers, was supposed to be playing o jogo bonito, the beautiful game—ending wars, pressing resets, pursuing pivots, and restoring America’s good name abroad.

Ferguson Prosecutor Tells Governor Nixon to ‘Man Up’
Governor Jay Nixon is undermining the process and further aggravating the situation in Ferguson, Mo., with his comments regarding who should prosecute the Brown case, according to the man at the center of the latest controversy in the death of Michael Brown.

Student punished for saying “bless you”
Kendra Turner was brought up right. She’s the kind of kid who says “yes sir” and “no ma’am.” She was “raised up right,” with good manners as they are prone to say around Dyersburg, Tennessee. So it was not out of character for Kendra to say “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed. But that common courtesy landed the 18-year-old in hot water.

California women’s shelters now only taking illegal aliens
A confidential source within the Marin County (Calif.) Sheriff’s Office recently contacted this columnist through a mutual friend and told a rather disturbing tale of his failed experience in trying to place a woman and her child, who were both in grave danger. The woman was a trial witness, set to testify against her boyfriend, who is a gang member.

What Are Your Kids Learning In School?
Probably we should all be past being shocked at what goes on in the public schools, but I confess that an email I got today from Devin Foley of Better Ed shocked me. It quoted descriptions, written by Twin Cities area high school teachers, of how their schools teach literature classes.

Gov. Perry Will Challenge Indictment Next Week
Gov. Rick Perry’s attorney, David Botsford, met with special prosecutor Mike McCrum in the chambers of Visiting Judge Bert Richardson today to discuss the August 15 indictment of the governor. Richardson appointed McCrum to investigate Perry’s veto, and McCrum led the grand jury in indicting the governor.

Economy & Taxes

European Austerity Is a Myth
Just as France’s and Italy’s poor economic results prompt the leaders of the euro area’s second and third biggest economies to step up their fight against fiscal austerity, it might be appropriate to ask whether they even know what that is. Government spending in the European Union, and in the euro zone in particular, is now significantly higher than before the 2008 financial crisis.

Pakistan: Khan, Qadri march towards Parliament, army in position
Unfazed by the deployment of the army, Pakistan opposition leader Imran Khan and cleric Tahirul Qadri tonight marched with thousands of their supporters towards the heavily fortified ‘Red Zone’, the capital’s diplomatic and political enclave, raising fears of clashes with the security forces.

China rejects U.S. criticism over jet encounter
China on Saturday called US criticism of an approach by one of its jets to a US Navy patrol plane off the Chinese coast earlier this week “completely groundless” and said its pilot had maintained a safe distance from the US aircraft.

Why Britain is poorer than any US state, other than Mississippi
Now and again, American inequality is on display to the world. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina and we have seen it again in the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. A white police offer shoots dead a black man, after having stopped him for jaywalking. Britain’s police don’t have guns, so these scenes are unthinkable. But American-style inequality?

Opinion

Revolutionary Justice
Certainly any time in America that an unarmed suspect is fatally shot by a policeman of the opposite race, there is a need for concern and a quick and full inquiry of the circumstances leading to such a deadly use of force. That said, there is something disturbing about the demagogic efforts to rush to judgment in Ferguson, Mo. While it is understandable to deplore the militarization of the police that might accentuate rising tensions on the street, and to note that a mostly white police force might be less sensitive to a majority African-American populace, there is as yet not much evidence that the antithesis — a more relaxed approach to crowd control under the direction of a sensitive African-American law-enforcement official — has so far resulted in an end of the street violence or of the looting of stores. Too little police deterrence can be just as dangerous as too much.

The Sinestro Theory of The Administrative State
Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a decline in the level of trust in government, and a rise in distrust, to levels unprecedented in American history. But to think this is an entirely new phenomenon is a mistake: trust in government has steadily declined since the Great Society and the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson. This graph from Pew with data running through the fall of 2013 shows how people answer the question: “How much of the time do you trust the government in Washington?” The answer is pretty clear: not much at all.

Let’s demilitarize the regulatory agencies too
One consequence of the events in Ferguson, Mo. is that people are talking with each other across ideological lines who usually don’t, a symbol being the attention paid on both left and right to Sen. Rand Paul’s op-ed last week in Time. And one point worth discussing is how the problem of police militarization manifests itself similarly these days in local policing and in the enforcement of federal regulation.

MSNBC Wouldn’t Be This Calm If Tea Party Protesters Threw Rocks at Their Hosts
After witnessing the spectacle of MSNBC host Chris Hayes getting pelted with rocks by an angry mob in Ferguson, Mo., Monday night, I was struck by a feeling of anger and frustration. Not at the rioters. Rioters throw rocks. That’s what they do. My anger was at the despicable display of “tolerance” and “understanding” displayed by Hayes, as he lowered his expectations for civil behavior to accommodate his liberal need to be accepted by the mob.

I will not be returning to Ferguson
I had been on the ground helping Al Jazeera America cover the protests and unrest in Ferguson, Mo., since this all started last week. After what I saw last night, I will not be returning. The behavior and number of journalists there is so appalling, that I cannot in good conscience continue to be a part of the spectacle.

Why the Gov. Rick Perry prosecution unconstitutionally intrudes on the gubernatorial veto power
I’ve been thinking some more about the veto power question: Does the Texas Constitution’s Veto Clause bar prosecuting Gov. Rick Perry for his vetoing the $7.5 million appropriation to drunk-driving D.A. Rosemary Lehmberg’s Public Integrity Unit? (I’m speaking here specifically of Count I, which is based on the veto; I’ve discussed Count II, which is based on the veto threat, elsewhere).

Unified Theory of Politics
OK, here’s the final piece in the puzzle in my series of posts leading up to the unified theory of politics. If you recall, I first wrote about Freemen vs Serfs, followed that up with a post musing about the left’s elevation of emotion over logic, and two weeks ago I pointed out Evan Sayet’s excellent “regurgitating the apple” theory, which is simply an extension of Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”. Bloom undoubtedly owes a great deal to C.S. Lewis’ “Abolition of Man”, and all of it flows back to C.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.

Bill Whittle: Ferguson and the real race war
Since the shooting of Michael Brown by a white policeman and the ensuing riots and looting in Ferguson, MO, Americans have been told, yet again, that there is an epidemic of crime against black people

Hugo Aftermath Post
The Hugo awards were announced last night at LonCon. Congratulations to the winners.

Ferguson is Calm, But What if There’s No Indictment?
The grand jury considering whether to charge Officer Darren Wilson in the Michael Brown case is coming under pressure from politicians and residents of Ferguson, Missouri to do the “right” thing and indict the policeman for murder.

R. Stacy McCain: Reading Feminist Theory … so you don’t have to!
Today, I ordered $108 worth of feminist books from Amazon, including two early classics, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. I’d previously read extensive excerpts of these, but I want to have them both in their dead-tree entirety, simply because that’s how I work best. I’ve also ordered books by lesbian feminists Jill Johnston, Marilyn Frye, Sue Wilkinson and Dana Heller, as well as Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives by radical feminist psychologist Dee Graham.